


(my sweet love) watch the air raids

by HannahPelham



Category: Silent Witness (TV)
Genre: F/M, I just fuckin love the romance aesthetic of the second world war, Unapologetically romantic, WW2 AU, also picture Emilia Fox in military uniform, because of who i am as a person, that'd be fucking hot, tiny brief encounter reference
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-03 10:22:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19462000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HannahPelham/pseuds/HannahPelham
Summary: Harry Cunningham is a Doctor and an ARP Warden in war-torn London, 1941. On his rounds one fiery night he finds a woman wandering the streets looking for shelter. Nikki Alexander is lost, and has no idea where the nearest shelter is. Luckily, Harry is there to help her.Title from 'The London Air Raids' by Vian Izak





	(my sweet love) watch the air raids

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theinvisibledisaster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theinvisibledisaster/gifts).



_ My sweet love watch the air raids _

_ As the streets of London are not safe _

**_The London Air Raids by Vian Izak_ **

Dr Harry Cunningham, Local GP in Victoria, London donned his tin hat and stepped out into the night. He, being a doctor, was exempt from military service, but felt he was doing his bit for the war effort by acting as an Air Raid Precaution Warden in his community. It helped him feel like he wasn’t being entirely useless. Now, in the (unbeknownst to him) dying days of the Blitz, he found himself walking the fiery streets of Central London, ushering people into shelters and putting out fires with the fire brigade. It was a smoky, foggy night as per usual. The incendiary bombs used by the Germans created more than just a fire. The smoke would get in your lungs and blind your vision. The fires burnt strong and loud, making Harry’s ARP whistle next to useless. In the firelight, however, through the smoke, Harry could make out a figure down the street from him. He could just hear her heels clacking on the pavement, the embers from buildings burning down lighting her up just enough for Harry to see her. He blew his whistle quickly, to hopefully alert her of his presence. 

“Miss! Miss! What are you doing out here?” Harry called, trying to get her attention over the devastating crashes and explosions of the bombs. 

“I’m not from around here - where’s the nearest shelter?” She replied, running as well as she could in her small heels to meet him. 

“This way, follow me!” Harry said, turning around and leading the way to the nearest community shelter, inside the tube station. They ducked inside and Harry led her down the winding corridors. She never caught a glimpse of his face, he was too busy trying to do his job quickly and efficiently enough to worry about that. 

They reached the platform, and Harry found a spot for her. She sat down, and finally got a good look at his face. It was quite a nice face. 

“Here you are, Miss…?”

“Alexander” She replied, smiling at him, “Nikki Alexander”

Harry smiled at her. He thought, in that moment, of nothing except this mysterious Miss Alexander. The bombs falling, the people around them, the war raging across Europe, all slipped his mind as he looked at her. He found a piece of paper in his pocket, and quickly scribbled his telephone number on it. 

“Here” He said, handing it to her, “I’m Harry Cunningham. It was lovely to meet you, Miss Alexander”

Harry walked back up to the streets, thinking of her. The thought that he may not make it to morning was there in the back of his mind. It was in the back of everybody’s minds during the war, but the main thoughts where not of the Blitz, they were of Nikki Alexander, whoever she was. Harry was fascinated by her. Why was she wandering around London alone at night? In the middle of this huge Luftwaffe bombing campaign? He wanted to know everything about her. 

Nikki Alexander leant against the wall of the tube station, listening to the chatter from the families around her. She turned the piece of paper from Harry over in her hands. It wasn’t every day that you got caught in an air raid and were saved from almost certain death by a dashing ARP Warden who proceeded to give you their telephone number. She couldn’t decide whether or not she was going to call him in the morning. He was handsome, obviously brave and daring, and he seemed nice enough. Nikki was a bit lonely. Her parents were long gone (her father in the Great War, her mother not long after), and she had no siblings. She thought she might at least find a friend in Harry Cunningham. 

Nikki found herself asking the telephone exchange girl for Victoria 8367 the next morning. It had been around 4am, the bombing calming down, when she’d decided she would call Harry. 

“Putting you through now, Miss” the girl said, and a click sounded. 

“Hello?” Harry asked as he picked the phone up quickly. He assumed it was a work call out. 

“Mr Cunningham? It’s Nikki Alexander, from last night” She said, hoping she’d got the right number. 

“It’s Dr Cunningham” He replied quickly, “but call me Harry”

“Dr Cunningham?” She queried. She had wondered the night before why a strapping young man like him wasn’t off in France or Belgium or wherever else they were sending the Army, Navy, and Air Force these days. 

“I’m a GP, Miss Alexander” He explained. 

“Nikki, please. Look, I was wondering why on earth you gave me your telephone number, but perhaps you’d like to explain over tea?” She asked nervously. She wondered whether he’d given her his phone number in a moment of madness, and had been regretting it ever since. 

“I’d love to” Harry replied, quickly quelling Nikki’s nerves, “There’s a Lyons around the corner from my surgery, can you write down the address if I give it to you?”

They agreed to meet for lunch, and Nikki found herself stood in front of her wardrobe in her underwear, panicking about what she was going to wear. What does one wear to lunch at Lyons with a Doctor? 

Nikki decided on a pale blue dress, and she did her hair ‘the pretty way’ (not held back with a huge number of pins). She knew she’d be a bit of a wreck if she braved the London Underground, so she found herself walking to where Harry had told her to meet him. She turned into the street, and there he was. Standing there was Harry, in a perfectly tailored three piece suit, doctor’s bag in hand. His overcoat was thrown over his arm, and his hat was sitting at just the right slightly jaunty angle on his head. She couldn’t remember ever seeing somebody look as good as Harry Cunningham did, stood there in the street, waiting for her. 

“Miss Alexander” he said as she approached, reaching out his hand as if to shake hers. 

“Dr Cunningham” She replied, smiling. She took his hand, and was pleasantly surprised when, instead of shaking it, he raised it to his lips and kissed it gently. 

Over tea and cake, Nikki Alexander and Harry Cunningham bared their souls to each other. Nikki knew all about Harry’s father’s suicide before the Great War, and Harry knew all about Nikki’s father being killed at Passchendaele, and her mother’s death a few years later. He knew about her loneliness, her desire to do good. Harry told her all about being an ARP Warden, the scrapes he’d gotten himself into since the war had started, and how he hardly had a fear of being killed in an air raid anymore because he’d made it through so many. 

Harry was absolutely besotted. Nikki was intelligent, kind, beautiful, good company, and she seemed like a genuinely decent person. 

Nikki was completely smitten with Harry. He was charming, witty, handsome, brave, fiercely intelligent, and really, genuinely good. 

Harry looked at his watch, and pulled a face. 

“I was meant to be back at the surgery twenty minutes ago” he said quickly, taking his hat and coat from the hatstand, and his bag from the floor. He leant over and kissed Nikki’s cheek quickly.

“Let’s do this again” he whispered, smiling at her, “Same time next week?”

“You’re on, Dr Cunningham” Nikki replied. She smiled widely at him, and Harry walked from the tea shop with a spring in his step. 

After a few weekly lunches at Lyon’s near the surgery, Harry decided it was time to come clean with Nikki. He’d fallen completely in love with her, and he thought she should know. They could both be dead tomorrow, so there was no time to spare. The conversation didn’t go quite how Harry had expected. 

“Nikki, what I’m trying to say, I suppose, is... I love you” Harry said quietly, holding Nikki’s hands over the table. Nikki smiled weakly. 

“I love you too, Harry, I really do” She replied, wondering how to break the news gently, “It’s just-”

“Just what?” Harry interrupted, fearing the worst. 

“I’ve been called up. To the WAAF” Nikki replied. She was devastated. Just as she was getting something or someone good in her life, she was being taken away from all of it. 

“At least you’ll be doing your bit” Harry reasoned, feeling the blow of this news severely, “and we can write to each other, darling”

Nikki blushed, and squeezed her eyes together tight. 

“Just as everything is going right…” she whispered. She looked up, and stared deeply into Harry’s eyes. He leant over the table and kissed her gently. 

“And everything will be alright. Trust me” He replied, squeezing her hands. She smiled at him, and hoped to god that everything would actually be alright. 

For a year, Harry and Nikki communicated by letter and telephone call. Sometimes the letters were short, updates on what they’d been doing, what they’d had for lunch. Other times, they would be pages and pages of romantic prose, one longing for the other’s presence. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and that really was the case for Harry and Nikki. The longer they spent apart, the more they genuinely adored each other. 

When Nikki finally got some leave, in summer 1942, she made sure the first thing she did was to go down to London, to see Harry. 

He waited at the train station for her, waiting to see that familiar face and blonde mop of hair come running down the platform. Soon enough, it did, and before Harry knew it, Nikki was in his arms. He pressed his lips to hers, longing to feel her touch again after all this time. They made their way from the station and found their tea shop. It had stopped being just another Lyon’s Corner House long ago. They sat at the table they’d sat at the first time they’d gone there, and something important was going to happen this time too. 

“I’m not going to make this some big thing” Harry started, fingers fiddling with the ring box in his pocket, “all I will say, is if I’m going to die in this damn war, I want to die married to you”. 

Nikki gasped. She’d expected a lot of things from her reunion with Harry, but a proposal hadn’t been one of them. 

“Nikki Alexander, will you marry me?” Harry asked, pulling the ring box from his pocket. He opened it, and placed it in front of Nikki. She looked in to find a pearl, surrounded by tiny diamonds, set in gold. It was perfect. 

“Yes, Harry Cunningham, I will” Nikki replied, tears spilling from her eyes. Harry took the ring from the box and slid it onto her finger. He leant over the table and kissed her passionately, and looked forward to the rest of his life. 

In the end, their wedding was rather eventful. Nikki, recently discharged from the WAAF, walked down the aisle by herself. Harry had been injured in a bombing raid a few months earlier, and stood at the end waiting for her with a walking stick (he hated it but she thought it made him look distinguished). Their first child, Liberty Nicola Cunningham, made her entrance into the world on V E Day. A brighter future for the world, but especially for the Cunninghams. 


End file.
